<b>"Aim for 1-2% keyword density."</b>

<b>"Aim for 1-2% keyword density."</b>

Sorry. That number is folklore with a decimal point.

There is no target density, and there never was a Google function that counts your keyword, divides by word count, and rewards the ratio. Density as a concept died with TF-IDF-era over-optimization filters that punished the high end and rewarded nothing on the low end.

Here's what actually happens: modern retrieval works on embeddings and entities, not term frequency over total words. A page can rank for "best running shoes" while saying "best running shoes" exactly once, because the surrounding 1,400 words establish the topic.

That study you keep quoting that found top pages average "X%" is correlation: good pages happen to mention their subject naturally. Reverse-engineering a target from the average is cargo-cult math.

Write until the topic is covered. Then stop counting.